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AN ADDRESS 



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ST. JOHN'S COU'T.EaE. 



AT 



A ]VIV AI>OI^IS, ]>J: A^R YL A.IV r>. 



Of} the Evening of July 2,'ith, 1S71, 



BY 



JAMES C. WELLING, LL D. 



ANNAPOLIS: 
WM. T. IGLEHART, PRINT. 

1871. 



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site (Homtttttnioii oi ^cMnns, ^isiMt ami gnvisiljU'. 



AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



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'^l\i\ p{jjl(if|a!ian ami j}lji(oiiiiiffjcai( Socictic 



OF 

ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, 

AT 

On the Evening of July 25th, 1S71, 

BY 

/ 

JAMES C. WELLING, LL D. 



ANNAPOLIS: 
WM. T. IGLEHART, PRINT. 

1871. 



St. John's College, 

Annapolis, Md., July 26th, 1871. 
Dr. James C. Welling : 

Dear iSir : — We have the honor on behalf of the Philokalian So- 
ciety, to request, for publication, a copy of the very appropriate and 
scholarly address with which you favored us on the 25th inst. 
We are, Dear Sir, 

With great respect, 

Your obedient servants, 

11. RiDDELL Brown, 
John S. Wirt, 
Walter R. Crabre, 
Exec. Committee of Philokalian Society. 



St. John's College, 

Annapolis, Md., July 26th, 1871. 
Dr. J. C. Welling : 

Dear Sir: — The Philomathean Society of St. John's College ten- 
der you their most grateful acknowledgments for your very eloquent 
and appropriate Address, delivered before the Literary Societies last 
evening, and request a copy for publication. 

Very respectfully yours, 

Wm E. Thompson, 
L. Parks, 
Heningiiam Gordon, 

Ex. Committee. 



Princeton, N. J., Aug. 14:th, 1871. 
Gentlemen : —It gives me pleasure to acknowledge the reception of 
your very kind notes under date of the 26th ultimo, and, at the same 
time, to comply with your request by placing in your hands a copy of 
the Address which I recently had the honor to deliver before the So- 
cieties you respectively represent. 

I am, Gentlemen, 

Your obliged friend, 

James C. Welling. 
Messrs. R. Ridded Brown, 
John S. Wirt and 
Walter R. Crahbe, 

Ex. Com. of Philokalian Society. 

Messrs. Wm. E. Thompson, 
L. Parks and 
ITeningham Gordon , 

Ex. Com. of Philomathean Society. 



She fflommuuiou of Mi^liW, W\MU ixml %nvH\hU, 



Gentlemoi of the Phllohalian and 

PJiilomafliean Societies : 

It is but a year ago that in this Hall I regretfully 
took from most of you the kind ''Farewell," and now, 
responsive to your call, I am with you once more to 
give and to receive the friendly "All Hail." Hail and 
Farewell! Two words which fall ever and anon from 
the lips of us all, as the pendulum of our life sways "be- 
twixt a smile and tear." It is true that, as I grasped 
the staff of the exile, I tried, in walking hence, to 
"manage it against despairing thoughts," being assured 
that the good staff, with your benison and God's bless- 
ing, would sometimes guide me back to this beautiful 
city on the banks of the Severn, to the loved friends 
whose faces, Mr and kind, are now^ beaming before me, 
to these classic shades, to this liaunt of the muses, and 
to you. And so to-night as I lay aside the sandals of 
the pilgrim at the door of your temple, and join with 
you in bringing a votive offering to your Alma Mater 
and mine, (for I am her adopted son,) it w^ould have 
better pleased me to yield my mind, in what the poet 
calls "a wise passiveness," to the inspiration of the time 
and place. But you have ordered it otherwise and 
bidden me at once to sit as a guest at your board, and 
to minister as a priest at one of your altars. 

x\s to me it is no light pleasure thus to share in your 
literary festivities to-night, so it is no vain ritual that 
brings you here around this common shrine. A com- 



n THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

pany of students, aspiring to the goodly fellowship of 
scholars, and already made, to some extent, partakers in 
the glorious heritage bequeathed to you by the past 
generations, you may fitly exclaim one to the other and 
cry to all around you, " Behold how good and how 
pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity." 
And I, as I look around me, Avould be strangely insen- 
sible to the genius of this place and the pleasant memo- 
ries that com^e thronging upon my mind, if I did not 
exclaim, "Peace be within thy walls," €k dear St. 
John's, " and prosperity within thy palaces. For my 
brethren and companions' sakes I wull now say, Peace 
be within thee." 

I come to speak as a senior brother to junior brethren, 
for to-niglit our first thought is due to the common Al- 
ma Mater whom we together hold in highest reverence. 
Though banded in two distinct fraternities, you each 
delightedly confess a common homage to her as together 
you bend at her knee. 

The companionships of college life! How dear they 
^ave been, how dear they are to you now, how dear 
they will be w^lien, for some of you, the links of the 
golden (^hain shall be broken on the morrow; and in 
the long years they shall grow only the dearer as seen 
through the mystic twilight of memory, investing them 
with the halo and consecration of a school boy's dream. 
The ties which here knit heart to heart shall never be 
loosed by the hand of Time, but are destined to run, like a 
silver cord, through the whole tissue of your after life. 
Dear will be the recollections of your common college 
home, dear the memory of classmates, dear the comrades 
of the base-ball ground, dear the song of the boat-club, 
with its "roAV, brothers, row," but, in some respects, 
dearer than all are the sacred bonds which have made 
you brethren of the same Literary Society, partakers in 
the same high mysteries known only to the initiate few, 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. ^ 

and more alluring far to you than those of Eleusis, of 
Delphi, or Dodona. For who of us ever forgets the 
hour when he was first admitted, as a trembling ne- 
ophyte, to share in the mysteries of his secret college 
society] And pledged as you are, by the very names 
you bear, to keep alive in your breasts the Love of 
Learning and the Love of the Beautiful, you are not 
likely ever to lose the sanctification of that dedicatory 
chrism with which you have here been anointed and 
set apart to the work and duty of the scholar's life; for 
wherever you may go, Philomatheans, you shall hear a 
voice crying in your ears like that which St. Augustine 
heard in the garden of Milan, '• Take and Read," as 
Nature's ample book of knowledge and the books of man 
lie wide open before you; and wherever you may turn, 
Philokalians, the Beautiful not in nature only but in 
elegant Letters and in Art shall remind you of the 
scholarly vows that are upon you. 

If, as Burke recalls, the mere holding of offices to- 
gether, the disposition of which sometimes depended 
on the drawing of a lot, and not on mutual selection, 
could rise among the Romans to a relation which was 
continued for life, and cherished under the binding 
name of necessitudo sortis ; if " to think alike concerning 
the Republic" was with them, as it often is with us at 
the present day, a sufficient ground of friendship and 
attachment, what shall we say of those more refined 
fellowships which a mutual affinity has selected, which 
congenial pursuits have cemented, which polite litera- 
ture has embellished, which a generous intellectual 
rivalry has quickened, which anniversary and festal 
days have consecrated, and in which the emulous young 
orator, our embryo Webster, or Everett or Pinkney, 
has furbished his first thunderbolts, or in which the 
future Addison and Macaulay have read their first 
essay, and the nascent Tennyson gathered his earliest 



8 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

laurels? In your mimic debates what liiorli themes have 
been handled, what deep questions probed; in your 
essays wdiat difficult theses discussed! — and all this has 
been done, not " the applause of listening senates to com- 
mand," but to merit the admiration of a few listening 
comrades, who w^ere to you the senate tliat is to he. 

The affairs of the nation I How often you have 
settled them in a single Friday evening's session, while 
our grown-up Solons at Washington have vainly 
wa'ano'lcd over them from dav to day, and "found no 
end in wandering mazes lost," like their predecessors 
in another place, not to be mentioned to ears polite, 
but a peep into whose conclave has been opened to us 
by the fancy of Milton. 

And then, what probabilities of " social reform," what 
visions of " scientific progress" have here engaged your 
attention! Instead of discussing, with the mediaeval 
schoolmen, how^ many angels can conveniently dance on 
the point of a needle without jostling each other, you 
have inquired into more "practical" questions, as, for 
instance, whether " the coming man" — (I do not mean 
the coming man for whom the expectant spinster waits 
in fancy, but that "coming man" for whom the whole 
creation waits to bring in the new Avater of our race) — 
may not turn out after all to be a woman^ leaping by a 
single bound the social and political space which now 
separates the sexes, nmch as Lyell tells us some aspiring 
ape may have first leaped the dividing line between the 
monkey and the man; or some "serene, imperial" 
Bloomerite, deeply imbued w^ith the spirit of '76, — of 
1876, I mean — rejoicing in the bifurcated continua- 
tions, and shrieking for her "rights" with a forty poli- 
tician power. Or, it may be you have speculated on 
the happiness of that good time coming under the ad- 
vent of " the coming man," whether he turn out to be 
of the male or female persuasion, when the infant chil- 



yiSlBLE AND LNVISIBLK. 9 

dien of the race, who now "sprawl and smile and grow'' 
within the precincts of the sacred home, shall be washed 
and combed and dressed by some beneficent labor- 
saving modification of the steam engine. Or perhaps 
you have wondered whether, for the relief of literary 
matrons and studious fathers, some ingenious Yankee 
may not yet make his ^'everlasting fortune" by invent- 
ing a patent baby-jumper that shall forever supersede 
the maternal lap and the paternal knee. If such 
achievements were scouted as impractibie by the gentle- 
men who took the negative side of these questions, I 
can easily fancy the indignant eloquence with which 
their antagonists of the afiirmati^ e repelled the timid 
misgivings of any who, in this Nineteeiith century, could 
thus put a boundary to the advance of modern progress 
and a limit to the conquests of modern science. 

Let it not be supposed, gentlemen, that I mean to 
make a mock of your discussions by indulging in this 
vein of pleasantry. Nothing could be further from my 
intention. I mean simply, as I run over these jocular 
themes, to avail myself of the privilege claimed by the 
poet Horace when he asks; 

— qiiamquam ridentem dicere verum 
Quid vetat ? 

The debates in which you have here participated, and 
by which your communion has been strengthened and 
adorned, will sufficiently reveal the formative influence 
they have exerted on your minds, whenever, in after life, 
you shall be called to Stand in any assemblage of your 
fellow-men and take a part in their deliberations ; that 
is, when you shall have exchanged the companionships 
of College society for the exacting competitions of active 
life. And hence it is, that you will ever look back, 
with equal gratitude and pleasure, to these mimic lists 
in .which your sinews have been nerved into the "wrest- 
ling thews" that may yet throw the world in the sterner 
gladiatorship to which you shall soon be called. 
9 



10 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS^ 

From the literary surrounding-s in which your \ive3 
have here heen placed, let its pass to consider another 
aspect of our subject, lying in the past, but revealing to 
us still another form of association which has often illus- 
trated the visible communion of scholars on the earth. 
I refer to the flict that in every great age its choicest 
spirits have wrouglit contemporaneously and in com- 
pany, because they have been alike imbued with the 
spirit of their ag-e. '^ The great artist," says a modern 
writer, " is never as one crying- solitary in the wilder- 
ness ; becomes in a troop; he comes in constellations. 
He is surrounded by Paladins that with him make the 
a^e illustrious. He belono-s to his ao-e, and his time 
produces many who, if not gi*eat as he, are yet like him. 
Nothing is more marked in history than the phenome- 
non of seasons of excellence and ages of renown. Wit- 
ness the eras of Pericles, Augustus, the Medici, Eliza- 
beth and others. What means this clustering, this 
companionship of art, unless that essentially the inspira- 
tion that produces it is not individual but general; is 
common to the country and the time ; is a national pos- 
session]" 

What a visible communion of scholars was that which, 
in the days of Athenian g'lory, Plato gathered around 
him in the olive gi'oves of Academus; or Zeno, as in 
that painted porch which the pencil of Polygnotus had 
adorned, he discoursed on the philosophy of self-re- 
nunciation, wdiich of all heathe|i systems is the closest 
of kin to Christianity; or Aristotle in the halls of the 
Lyceum, as he Avalked and talked with his disciples;, 
or Epicurus, as he speculated on the felicities of 
scholarly friendship — " the life-gladdening, life-embel- 
lishing union of congenial natures," a» an element of 
that su'^ai!X(r,{a wliichy iu the hands of his followers, wasi 
so greatly perverted, and in subsequent times has been 
so greatly misunderstood! In no age of the world has 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 11 

tlie impact of mind upon mind, the immediate per- 
sonal communion of living teachers with intelligent 
pupils been so direct and so long-sustained as in Athens, 
during the fourth eentnry before Christ ; and hence, in no 
Tige of the world has the energising force of the human 
intellect left an impress so indelible. Every thing about 
Athens in her palmy days was held and enjoyed in com- 
mon by her free citizens, for in every thing there was 
community of tliought and discussion, supported by 
community of political privilege, community of public 
taste and community of literary and artistic enjoyment 
It is for this constellated glory that the world still looks 
back, with adnnring gratitude, to thut immortal city, 

"Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil, 
Afcheos, the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
And eloquence, native to famous wits 
' Or hospitable." 

*' Native to famous wits or hospitable," says Milton, 
for not only was she the prolific mother of scholars and 
orators and philosophers, but, through successive cen- 
turies, she gathered within her walls, by the attractions 
of her culture and by the fascinations of her art, the 
most illustrious of other lands, who here were sure of 
finding that congenial fellowship which is at once the 
ornament and the best support of intellectual lile. 

And when we recall the fact, so clearly stated by 
Cicero in a familiar passage, that "all the arts that per- 
tain to culture have among them a certain common 
bond, and are mutually allied as by a sort of relation- 
ship," we can readily understand why it is that the 
greatest minds of our race have commonly come not in 
the single and solitary grandeur of a gloomy isolation, 
but in company with kindred spirits, giving and receiv- 
ing each his separate glory, but all together making the 
crowning glory of their times. 

In the whole range of literature I can recall but two 
names which seem to suggest an exception to the gen- 
eralitv of this nile. I refer to Homer and Milton. 



13 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

Homer is, perhaps, a seeming rather than a real excep- 
tion to the nde. His gTandeiir is soHtary, because his 
rivals among the wandering rhapsodists of Greece have 
perished from the memory of man; but that he had 
brother minstrels and rivals is not a mere inference sup- 
ported only by the rational probabilities of literary his- 
tory. It is also iiTiplied in the words of the old bard 
himself, if we may tnist in the g*enuineness of the lines 
ascribed to him, in which he represents himself as say- 
ing* to the women of Delos: "When anyone among 
the men of earth, a stranger from afar, shall ask of you, 
4)l maidens, who is the sweetest minstrel in this land 
and in whom you most delig'ht, then make answer, ''it 
is the blind man who lives in steep Chios.'" 

Homer, then, was content to be known as one among 
the minstrels of Greece, It was his aspiration to be 
"the sweetest of all." 

The soul of Milton, as Wordsworth says, "was like a 
star and dwelt apart." But this isolation of his literary 
life, due to the infelicity of his political surroundings, 
was accepted by himself as a misfortune; and hence it 
is that, in the first half of his great poetic argument, 
that is, in the first six books of the Paradise Lost, 
where he consciously soars above the ^Eonian mount, 
passes the flaming bounds of space and time in his ad- 
venturous song, and sings of things invisible to mortal 
sight, he commits himself, without reluctance, to the 
guidance of his Heavenly Muse, as finding in her society 
his sufficient solace; but when, at the opening of the 
seventh book in his immortal epic, he prays the muse to 
return him "within the visible diurnal sphere," he 
can only say, with a redoubled bitterness of speech as he 
laments the evil days in which his lot was cast, — 

"More safe I sing, with mortal voice unchanged 
To hoarse or uiute, though fallen on evil days. 
On evil dajs though fallen and evil tongues: 
In darkness and with dangers compassed round 
And solitude." 



o 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE, 1' 

But the great teachers of the world in Literature, in 
Poetry, in Philosophy, in Science, have generally come 
with a troop of kindred spirits in their train or in their 
near surroundings. So was it in Athens when Plato 
taught in the Academy, when Ictinus reared the stately 
proportions of the Parthenon, when Phidias carved out 
of ivory and gold the statue of the Olympian Jove, 
when Pericles thundered and lightened from the Bema, 
and when Sophocles vied with JEschylus, and Aristo- 
phanes with Euripides to add new glories to the Athe- 
nian drama. It was so in Pome during the Augustan 
age when scholars and poets and philosophers found 
not only patrons but appreciative critics in the palace of 
Ceesar and at the country seat of Maecenas. 

In the old heathen mythology the Muses are repre- 
sented as sisters, joined in an unbroken sisterhood, and 
hence it is that the sons of men who worship and wed 
them must needs form an unbroken brotherhood. And 
hence, too, the justice of the remark which has so often 
been made that "it is only in the stir of a city where man 
meets man, and each man's energies are called into the 
fullest play; where commerce brings the world within 
the city's gates and yet is not its whole life, but leaves 
room for all there is in man besides and beyond the 
trading spirit to assert itself" — it is only in the stir of 
such a city that a great centre of literature can be es- 
tablished.* 

Such a centre was Florence in Dante's day and after 
it. The genius of the great Florentine did not come 
unheralded or dawn upon the world like that of one 
born out of due time. He came magna caterva comi- 
tantdi Such a centre was London in the days of Shakes- 

*See Morley's English writers, voL I, p. 12. 

fin a late nun)ber of the Romanisclie Stnch'en (Halle, Germany) Jus- 
tus Grion describes the contents of MS. 3798 in the Vatican, con- 
taining 313 canzoni and 683 sonetti of 93 Italian poets, all of whom 
wrote before or during the early period of Dante's life. Only one-third 
has been printed. 



14 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

peare and Ben Jonson and Bacon and B-aleigh when, in 
the Devil's Tavern and in the Mermaid Inn, was laid 
the foundation of those literary clubs which have since 
done so much to strengthen the silken cords of literary 
fellowship by tying them wdth the "lover's knot" of 
private friendship ; like that Brothers' Club in which 
Bolingbroke and Harley and Swift were wont to meet, 
blending a common love of letters with a common creed 
in politics; or like the Kit-Kat Club, that assemblage 
which comprised all the various talents and accomplish- 
ments of the Whig party of England in the days of 
Queen Anne, and in which Addison shone with the 
mild splendor of the moon amid the lesser stars that 
then composed the galaxy of the British essayists; or 
like the Beefsteak Club, that company of dramatic 
artists over which, at a later day. Peg Woffington waved 
the sceptre of her fascinations. I need not speak of 
later clubs, in the Britisli metropolis, more known it 
may be by current report, but less renowned in the an- 
nals of British scholarship. 

Nor need I speak of that most remarkable communion 
of wits and scholars and cultivated women, who once 
gathered into a single exclusive coterie all that Paris 
had of most distinguished in rank and social o^race and 
literary ambition, — that famous club which met every 
Saturday in the blue room of the Hotel de Pambouil- 
let, — a club which, despite the affectation of its members, 
did so much to refine the language, soften the manners, 
conquer the aristocratic prejudices and abate the feudal 
pride of the French nobility in the days of Anne d'Au- 
triche and of Louis Quatorze. For here it was that the 
French nobleman first learned to meet the roturier man 
of letters on terms of social equality. Here Corneille 
read aloud all his plays before they appeared on the 
boards of the Theatre de Bourgogiie ; here Bossuet 
recited his first sermon; here Descartes, the founder of 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 1.3 

philosophy on the continent of Europe, read for the first 
time his immortal Discours de la Metlwde ; and here, 
too, Pascal came to rest from the solitary vigils by which 
he exalted his imperial genius, and from the macera- 
tions by which he kept his body under at the monastery 
of Port Royal des Champs. Port Poyal des Champs! 
What discourse on the "communion of scholars" could 
leave unnoticed the community of saintly women and 
learned men who once lived within its hallowed monas- 
tic walls and in the neighboring farm-house of Les 
Granges'? "Not to know the history of Port Royal," 
said Poyer-Collard, "is not to know the history of hu- 
manity." Attached to this convent, but bound by no 
other vows than those of a common piety and a common 
love of letters, were scholars like Arnauld, and Pascal, 
and Tillemont, and Nicole, and Le Maitre, and St. 
Cyran, and De Saci, and Quesnel, and Racine — names 
which not only mark but make the highest glory of the 
Augustan age of French literature. The ploughshare 
has passed over the foundations of this monastic retreat, 
but still shall history embalm the memory of the devout 
men and holy women who here found in society all the 
charm it can give and in solitude all the solace it can 
bring. Alike by their lives and by their deaths they 
showed that they belonged to the confessors and 
martyrs of whom the world was not worthy. And as 
the world has turned its back on this communion of 
saints and sages, it has learned only to mock at the 
vagaries of the periwigged wits and blue stocking dames 
who once gathered in the Palace of Rozalinde, as the 
Hotel de Rambouillet was called in the dialect of pre- 
ciosite, or who dawdled in literary dalliance under the 
Bower of Zyrphee, as the alcove was called in which 
the brilliant Arthenice gave audience to the most fa- 
vored of her votaries. 

But why should I speak of literary coteries m London 



IG THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

or In Paris^ when some of yoii can recall so mucli more 
vividly the pleasures of that more visible as well as more 
modest communion of scholars in which it has been your 
good fortune and mine to have a share'? The fame of 
the "Annapolis Literary Club" may not indeed vie with 
the historic glory that floats like an aureole around the 
dingy roof of the Mermaid Inn in London, or which 
still consecrates the Blue Chamber of Madame de E.am- 
bouillet, but dearer far to you are the associations which 
have brought the social grace and culture of this refined 
capital into living contact with the scholarly culture of 
this College, — thus spreading the charms of society over 
the pursuits of literature, and adding the amenities of 
life to the aspirations of intellectual ambition. Haud 
inexpertus loquor, for "I, too, w^as once in Arcadia," 
and my name was once enrolled on the list of its mem- 
bers. And when, like me, you shall be scattered far 
hence, it may be that, like me, you will remember how 
Corson personated Shylock or "exegeticised" the poetry 
of Tennyson; or how Parks set the bells of Poe to ring- 
ing through all their changes, and if;, perchance, the 
spectral shape of Mr. Tonson and the weeds of his pu- 
tative widow should "come again" to you in fancy, you 
will smile afresh at the antiquated coat of the one and 
admire the tearful beauty of the other; nor can you 
ever forget the dignity Avith which Monsieur Morbleu, 
" Chevalier de St. Louis and General de division," ex- 
changed the hctton of the ancien regime for the comb and 
tongs of the London barber, or the more than Parisian 
grace with which Madame La Marquise de Bellegarde, 
"Dame d'honneur et grandebeaute," wielded her fan as 
she whispered behind it her gracious complaisance at 
Monsieur Morbleu's poUtesse* 

*The reader will readily understand that allusion is made to Mon- 
cricff's play entitled "Monsieur Tonson," which was twice admirably 
rendered among the "Private Theatricals" of the Club. 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 17 

But I grow obscure to most of my hearers and, in 
the judgment, perhaps, of others, trench on sacred ground 
in thus disclosing to uninitiate ears the mysteries of the 
Annapohs Literary Chib. 

And so we will let the curtain lall on this commu- 
nion of scholars and fair women. 

Let us rise in thought from the visible forms of as- 
sociated life to consider that invisible communion of 
scholars which invests our theme with a more than 
earthly grandeur and a more than secular significance. 
Besides that visible communion of scholars in which we 
exult, as with clasped hands we give to our associates 
the mystic pass-word of a literary confraternity; besides 
that fellowship which unites us as the foster-children of 
a common Alma Mater; besides those banded brother- 
hoods which, under the name of Club or Society, of In- 
stitute or of Academy, have in the ages past filled their 
conspicuous place in the eye of the world, there is a 
higher and more mysterious communion which, as it 
were, enfolds them all in its bosom. Every visible fra- 
ternity has its mysteries known only to the initiate, but 
the scholar is born into the invisible fellowship of all 
the great and good who have lived before him; and 
that man misses the crowning glory of the higher life 
who fails to link himself in a conscious vital sympathy 
with the great and wise and good who have bequeathed 
to him the glorious heritage of the past. 

— " 'Tis the sublime of man, 
Our noon-tide majesty, to know ourselves 
Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole ; 
This fraternizes man, this constitutes 
Our charities and bearings." 

When the children of Israel entered the Promised 

Land they found awaiting them not only the streams of 

milk and honey supplied by a bounteous nature, but also 

the accumulated fruits of human labor — "houses full of 

good things which they filled not, wells digged which 

3 



/ 



18 rilE (KIMMUNION OF SCHOLARS. 

they digged not, vineyards; and olive trees which they 
planted not," and — you have often been reminded of the 
comparison — ^it is even into such a land, enriched, as it 
were, by the sweat and blood of millions, that every 
scholar enters. Each generation of men absorbs and 
feeds upon the life-blood of the generation that preceded 
it; but the life-blood of the soul, as it passes in quicken- 
ing streams from generation to generation, is not only 
absorbed but transmuted into a higher spirit of life, and 
works from age to age in ways more and more trans- 
cendent and in forms more and more manifold.* 

It is not enough to say that we stand upon the 
shoulders of the giants who have preceded us, and, there- 
fore, though pigmies ourselves, can see further than 
they. We are unworthy of our high intellectual line- 
age, of the Anakim whom we claim for our spiritual 
forefathers, unless their "blue blood" tells in our veins, 
as generous blood always toill tell. The scholars of to- 
day, if duly realizing their privileges, if fully conscious 
of their obligations, if rightly discharging their function, 
are not only gathering up into their life all the sap and 
• juices that have fed the brain of the past ages, but, 

*"Les penseurs sublimes, dans la merveilleuse variete de leurs ca- 
racteres^s'enfantent et se completent par une etude sympatbique. Cette 
generation progressive des grandes intelligences est un interessant et 
■^l;^ beau spectacle. Pour ne citeiique peu de noms, Platon nait de Socrate ; 
Virgile, d'Homere* Saint Thomas d'Aquin, de Saint Augustin; Moliere, 
de Terence et d'Aristophane ; Racine, d' Eschyle et de Sophocle; La 
Fontaine, d' Esope etde Phedre; Malebranche, de Descartes; Bossuet, 
de TertuUien et de Saint Augustin, et Saint Augustin lui-m^me, de 
Platon et de Saint Paul. La geneologie des grandes intelligences 
n'est pas toujours facile a constater, parcequ' il arrive plus d' une fois 
que des fruits eclatants sortent de germes restes obscures pour nous, 
mais la generation n'en existe pas moins. De memo que, dans I'ordre 
physique, les arbres et les plautes, les fieurs et les moissons, croissent 
et se developpent sous le soleil, ainsi, dans 1' ordre intellectuel, il y a 
une sorte de soleil compose de rayons parties de Fame de chaque grand 
homme; c'est a sa chaude et vivifiante lumiere que se produisent et 
s'achevent les nobles esprits epars li travers le monde, et ce sont les 
feux salutaires de cet invincible soleil (jui fertilisent la pensee et font 
monter la seve du genie." Poujoulat : Histoirc dc Saint Augustin, 
&c., Vol. II, page 423. 



VISIBLE AND IN VISIBLE. 19 

working in the line of the same liigh endeavors, are 
called at once to clarify the waters of this higher life, 
and to deepen the fertilizing cnrrents with which it 
flows. And it is in virtue of this vital union between 

the living and the dead that 

— "The truly great 
Have all one age, and from one visible space 
Shed influence ! They both in power and act 
Are permanent, and time is not with them 
Save as it worketh for them, they in it." 

Past and Future, says the poet, 

— "Are the wings 
On whose support, harmoniously conjoined, 
Moves the great spirit of human knowledge." 

And it was in view of this fact that the whole pro- 
cession of our race, from the days of its great progeni- 
tor in Eden, passed before the august mind of Pascal as 
*' the life of one man who never dies and who learns con- 
tinually." All that men have greatly thought, and 
done, and suffered, has been treasured up as a precious 
elixir of life in the golden phials of literature — phials 
full of odors exhaled from the heart and brain of the 
choice and master spirits of all time, and less sacred in the 
scholar's eye than those only which the Kevelator saw 
in holy vision — " Golden phials full of odors which are 
the prayers of Saints." 

I do but speak in a figure of rhetoric which has be- 
come almost a common-place in our literature. " Books," 
says Milton, in a passage liimiliar to you all, but which 
can never be too often recited before any assemblage of 
scholars, " Books are not absolutely dead things, but' do 
contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that 
soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do pre- 
serve, as in a phial, the purest efficacy and extraction 

of that living intellect that bred them Who kills 

a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but he 
who destroys a good book kills reason itself; kills the 
image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man 
lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the pre- 



•>() THE (M)MMUNJ()N OV SCHOI.ARS, 

cioiis life-blood of a inaster spirit, embalmed and treas- 
ured up on purpose to a life beyond life." 

llie wires of the electric telegraph, running under 
the deptlis of the sea and climbing the crests of the 
mountain, are fast bringing the different nations of the 
earth into a communion which may be seen and felt — 
into ''the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the 
World." But how infinitely more pervasive, and how 
infinitely more subtile are the currents of kindred 
thought and feeling which have been transmitted 
through the generations of the earth by the electric en- 
ergy of that ivory plectrum with which old Homer first 
set the chords of his harp in vibration! The tones of 
that harp are still ringing in our ears to-day, as clear 
and fresh as when the blind old bard first waked the 
echoes of Scio's rocky isle, or caught the measureless 
laughter of the waves as they danced on the JEgean sea. 
Justly has the greatest of our American poets, following 
the example of scholars from age to age, counted it only 
a due homage to lay the ripest offering of his muse on 
the altar which lias already sanctified so many similar 
gifts. You will understand that I allude to Mr. Bry- 
ant's recent poetic version of the Iliad. 

"All the genius of the past," says Bulwer, "is in the 
atmosphere we breathe at present," and I would fain 
impress not only this fact upon you, but, for you, the 
much more important fact that this genius is in the in- 
tellectual atmosphere which envelopes us, not only to 
serve as a vital breath which you should passively in- 
hale, but as a vitahzing energy by which you are to 
kindle into a brighter, purer flame, the fires of your 
mental and moral being. It is this communion of our 
spirits with the great teachers of the race which should 
make our hearts burn within us till they run over 

"With silent worship of the groat of old, 
The dead but sceptred sovrans who still rule 
Our spirits from their urns." 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 21 

The world in which the scholar lives is filled witli 
what the philosophical poet of England calls '• the spirit- 
ual Presences of absent Things." He dwells in a 
realm more rife with sweet sounds than the enchanted 
isle of Prospero, and the authors of his unearthly music, 
like Ariel, "do their sp righting gently." As we listen 
to this music we say with Ferdinand in the x^lay, 'T 
have followed it, or it hath drawn me rather." 

The very words which we speak, "Hyblsean mur- 
murs of poetic thought," as they often are, whisper to 
us of the distant tracts from which they have been 
blown to our ears. The old ethnic mythology lives no 
longer in the faith of modern reason, yet still we speak 
of omens and auspices^ as when Homulus and Remus 
watched the flight of birds on the Palatine Hill and 
Mt. Aventine. Still we speak of aucmries as if the 
spell of the old enchantments was yet upon us. The 
astrology of the middle ages has long since faded away 
before the light of scientific astronomy, but still, 

"Doth the old instinct bring back the old names, 
And to yon starry worlds they now are gone, 
Spirits or gods that used to share this earth 
With man as with their friend ; and to the lover 
Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky 
Shoot influence down, and even at this day 
'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, 
And Venus that brings every thing that's fair." 

The words of every day speech, thus handed down by 
antiquity, have been called ''fossil poetry," or "fossil 
history," but to the scholar they are more than "fossils." 
For to him they are not dead things, — are not to be 
likened even to "curious shells" cast up by the ocean 
of Time, and still retaining in their "convolutions" some 
"sonorous cadences" of the element whence they came. 
The vocabulary of a living speech may rather be com- 
pared, (as Shakespeare has been compared,) to some "uni- 
versal ivy" which, planting its roots deep downward in 
the soil of the past, grows upward with its infinite 
branches till it covers with an evergreen foliage "the 



')•) 



THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 



whole system and face of things, tilling every nook and 
cranny of the visible world," and winding with its deli- 
cate and tenacious tendrils into every sinuosity of the 
human heart. 

It is not only in the cosmical arrangements of the 
physical universe that we see, as Goethe says, 

"How all ODe whole harmonious weaves, 
Each in the other works and lives ; 
See heavenly powers ascending and descending, 
The golden buckets one long line extending." 

As in the world of matter so also in the w^orld of 
mind there is unity. The Commonwealth of Letters, 
by the thoughts it cherishes, by the words it speaks, by 
the books it reads, by the beauty it worships, binds all 
its votaries of e^ery age into one invisible communion 
that subsists without chasm or rupture. And in so say- 
ing I do not utter a mc^re sentiment, iit to soothe the 
aesthetic sense, but I give expression to a philosophic 
truth, much overlooked, it may be, but none the less 
suited to convince the reason and stimulate the energy 
of every true scholar. "The Communion of Saints," — 
think you that it has the prominent place that is as- 
signed to it in the creed of our common christian faith, as 
the expression of a mere sentiment^ I tell you nay, for 
it means much more than this. It is a great fact^ bring- 
ing with it not only the grandeur of a sublime concep- 
tion, but the motive power of a constraining influence. 

Listen to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
as he calls the roll of the Saints in that splendid eleventh 
chapter, studded thick with names that shine as stars 
in the firmament, and tell me if this be nothing more 
than the necromancy of an exalted imagination. Mark 
the conclusion to which he brings his solemn citation: 
" Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so 
great a cloud of witnesses, let iis lay aside every weight 
and the sin which doth so easily beset us^ and let us 
run with patience the race that is set before ?/,.'?." "The 



VISIBLE AND ENA'ISIBLE. 2'^ 

Communion of the Saints," then, is not a phrase to be 
idly pattered in our creed as a doctrine which merely 
invites the christian, in a sort of pious ecstacy, to repose 
on the flowery beds of a dreamy contemplation, but, as 
the majestic words fall from our lips, they should rather 
smite our ears with the force of a thunder-peal dropping 
from " the great cloud of witnesses" who hold us in 
full survey, and who adjure us to work manfully on 
earth if we would be worthy of their immortal fellowship 
in heaven. Men may rest from their labors on earth, 
but their works follow them both on earth and in heaven. 
In the scheme of human society, with its endless actions 
and re-actions, as no man liveth to himself, so no man 
dieth to himself Death does not put an end to the in- 
fluence for good or for evil of any man who ever has 
lived, or who ever shall live on the face of the globe. 
And as if to set this fact conspicuously before the eyes 
of the whole race and for all time, the first man who 
ever died on the earth, though cut off in the morning 
of his days by the hand of violence, still calls to us 
across the chasm of more than sixty centuries, with a 
voice as clear and distinct as that of his blood when first 
it cried out of the ground yet red and reeking from the 
first murder, and that murder a fratricide; for is it not 
written that "by faith Abel ofi'ered a more excellent 
sacrifice than Cain, God testifying to his gifts, and by 
it he, heing dead, yet speahetTi.^'' And so from the death 
of righteous Abel, the protomartyr of our race, down to 
that of the latest patriot or confessor who has died for 
truth and right, it may be said with the poet, 

— "They never fail who die 
In a great cause ; the block may soak their gore ; 
Their heads may sodden in the sun ; their limbs 
Be strung to city gates and castle walls ; 
But still their spirit vjalks abroad." 

"Who knoweth," said the moral dramatist of Greece, 
"whether Life may not be Death, and Death be 
Life." You remember the sublime philosophy incul- 



24 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

<;ate(l by the I'eaclier of (ialilee under this head 
when he said: "Verily I say unto you except a corn of 
wheat lall into the ground and die^ it abideth alone; 
but if It die it bringeth forth much fruit." Behold in 
this maxim of the Incarnate Wisdom a condensed state- 
ment of the whole philosophy of human history, and an 
enunciation of the dynamic law of human progress. As 
that which is sown is not quickened except it die, so, 
in the economy of the intellectual and moral world, we 
see that its dynamic forces are then most potent when 
they have passed from the stage of a concrete individu- 
alism, and been transmuted into an abstract spiritual 
essence, capable of being diffused through the whole 
race, and of being made the seed-corn of a manifold re- 
production. " Dust to dust," as the poet reminds us, 
was not written of the soul, whether it be the soul that 
once lived in tlie bodies of tlie mighty dead, or the soul 
that once informed the organized mind of an extinct civi- 
lization. "The dead languages" of Greece and Rome, 
because of the reproductive power with which they are 
charged by the thought that still lives in them, and by 
the creative art which still informs them, are more truly 
alive to-day than when they were yet spoken on the 
banks of the Ilissus and the Tiber. The seed that is 
sown in the ground and which, by its death, nurtures 
the germs of the waving harvest, yielding some thirty, 
some sixty and some an hundred fold for every separate 
grain that was planted in the earth, and which ensures 
thereby a perpetual succession of fruit after its kind, so 
that seed-time and harvest shall never fail, is surely 
more fraught with the spirit of life than the grain which 
has been triturated by the mill and converted into the 
loaf that feeds a single household. And so it is that 
the intellectual and moral forces which are concrete in 
the individual during his life, become the abstract spir- 
itual possession of the whole race after that individual's 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 25 

. death, if only he has left those forces in a shape capable 
of being transmitted to the generations that come after 
him ; and it is in this shape that they are endowed with 
the most potent energy of reproduction. "The good 
man," says Callimachiis, "never dies." The actions of 
the just when once they have been released from " this 
muddy vesture of decay," "smell sweet and blossom in 
the dust." With the mantle of the ascending prophet 
a double portion of the prophet's spirit descended on 
his successor. It was because Thucydides consciously 
wrote for those who wished to see the truth both of 
what has happened and tcill hereafter happen again, 
according to the uniformities of human nature, that he 
composed his philosophical history of the Peloponnesian 
%var, "as a possession forever, rather than as a prize es- 
say for the current time." 

It is because the social organism, in which our lives 
are cast, is fitted not only to receive but also to trans- 
mit and to transfigure the impressions left on the race by 
individual minds that the civilized world grows wiser 
and better as it growT. older. 

— "The brave, the mighty and the wise. 
We men, who in our morn of youth defied 
The elements must vanish. Be it so ! 
Enough if something from our hands have power 
To live, and act, and serve the future hour. 
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, 

Through Love, through Hope, and Faith's transcendent dower, 
We feel that we are greater than we Jcnow.^^ 

All doctrines, all truths, all principles in order to be- 
come potential forces in society must pass through two 
stages. They must first be embodied in a living per- 
sonality, and, after being thus steeped with the thought 
of this living person, they must be spiritually diffused 
through a whole body of common adherents. The con- 
crete embodiments of individual excellence not only act 
directly on their own times, and on the generations that 
come after them bv the transmitted force of their lives, 



26 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

but become al^o the ideal types selected lor imitation . 
by a whole class of minds imbued with the love of a kin- 
dred excellence. "Great and splendid actions," says 
Robert Hall, and the same, of course, may be said of 
great and splendid lives, "are important both from their 
immediate advantage and their remoter influence. 
They ofte^n save and always illustrate the age and 
nation in which they appear. They raise the standard 
of morals; they arrest the progress of degeneracy ; they 
diffuse a lustre over the path of life : monuments of the 
greatness of the human soul, they present to the world 
the august image of virtue in her sublimest form, from 
which streams of light and glory issue to remote times 
and ages; while their commemoration by the pen of 
historians and poets awakens in distant bosoms the 
sparks of kindred excellence." 

It is a fine saying of Eulwer's that " the emulation of 
a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries; the 
competitors with whom he seeks to vie are the dead." 
It was not so much the fierceness of his rivalry with the 
living Aristides, as the laurels of discrowned Miltiades 
which would not let Themistocles sleep. You remem- 
ber how the comrades of that knightly soldier of France, 
La Tour d'Auvergne, kept his name on the roll of his 
regiment for years after his death, and how, at the 
morning and evening drum-beat, the adjutant answered 
for him at the roll-call, " Dead, on the field of honor." 
And each time that his name w^as thus called, think you 
that it was not worth, by the persuasive power of a sub- 
.lime example, more than the names of any ten men 
among his survivors'? "Of illu-strious men," says Thu- 
cydides, " the whole earth is the sepulchre — a sepulchre 
not marked by any inscription on the columns erected 
in their own land alone, because even in foreign lands 
there dwells in each man's breast that unwritten mem_0' 
rial of their fame which is better than any material 
monum_ent." 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE, 27 

Macaulay remarks in the most brilliant of his Essays, 
that "doctrines must generoMy be embodied before they 
can excite strong public feeling," So they must. But 
it is equally true that doctrines must ahcays be spiritu- 
alized before even the conditions of a public feeling in 
their favor can be said to exist. "A little leaven leav- 
eneth the whole lump," not forsooth, because it is little, 
but because it is of the nature of leaven to exert a sub- 
tle and pervasive force that does not depend on mere 
mechanical laws for its efficacy. And in like manner, 
political and moral and religious doctrines are potential 
forces in the figure of society not simply because of the 
attractive power that results from their embodiment in 
illustrious individuals^ but because, being, as it were, 
the extract and quintessence of superior minds, they 
have in them an inherent energy which tends, by the 
wide fermentation of thought it engenders, to modify 
and assimilate the minds ol other men. Without this 
inherent spiritual energy they are as inert as salt which 
has lost its savor, and are fit only to be cast out and 
trodden under foot of men. 

And hence it is in perfect keeping with this great 
double truth that the mystery of the Divine Incarnation 
passed into the mystery of Christ's perpetual presence 
with his church by the power and personality of the 
Holy Ghost, — that is, that the mystery of God imtJi us 
passed into the greater mystery of God in us; and it 
was because, after His death, the disciples of Christ 
were endued wdth a mighty spiritual power from on 
high, that they wrought, as He had foretold they should, 
greater miracles than their Master — even transfbrming 
the pagan world by the power and plenitude of the im- 
manent, informino; Spirit of Truth and Holiness. 

While the Word was made flesh He could liken His 
Kingdom, only to a grain oi° mustard seed, or to the 
leaven that was hidden in three measures of meal. 
It is not true, as Macaulay says, that "it was before 
Deity embodied in a human form, walking among men, 



'28 THE C0M5IUN10X OF SCHOLARS, 

partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, 
weeping over their graves, skimbering in the manger, 
bleeding' on the cross, that the prejudices of the Syna- 
gogue, and the doubts of the Academy, and the pride 
of the Portico, and the fasces of the lictor, and the 
swords of thirty legions were humbled into dust." 
For I need not remind you that all these triumphs of 
Christianity were acliieved, not under the immediate 
dispensation of tlie Incarnate Truth, but by the Spirit 
of Truth, whose dispensation was ushered in on the day 
of Pentecost with a sound from heaven, ^"as of a rushing 
mighty wind" — the symbol of a power as resistless as it 
is invisible, and as penetrating as it is all enfolding. 
And so it came to pass that the remembered words of 
a dead Christ — dead, but ever living — as breathed 
through the heart and lips of ITis disciples, were en- 
dowed with a potency greater far than the spoken 
words of Him who spake as never man spake. 

And so, too, it is that all human thoug'ht, all human 
feeling, all human activity, all human literature, all hu- 
man art, from the inherent nature of mental forces, from 
the inter-communion of mind with mind in the organism 
of society, and from the unbroken continuity of the 
generations of men, has in it something eternal which 

"Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 
Spreads undivided, and operates unspent." 

All human thinking and striving has, moreover, 
something vicarious in its influence and effect; and, 
hence, it is only just to say, that the profoundest dogma 
of our christian faith — that of a vicarious redemption — 
has, for those who accept it, a rational congruity which 
plants its roots in the profoundest depths of human na- 
ture, and in the very subsoil of all human history. Sic 
vos non vohis is the motto of all who think, and work, 
and sufl'er in the scheme of human society, whether it 
be the "forlorn hope" which, on some stricken field 
plucks victory from the jaws of defeat, not for them- 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. 29 

selves but for posterity; or whether it be the noble arm)' 
of the martyrs, whose blood is quickened into the seed 
of the Church — some Virgin Martyr, as in the play of 
Massinger, sending down from heaven to earth the flowers 
and fruits of Paradise to serve as an earnest of the Heav- 
enly inheritance on which she had entered ; or whether it 
be a Plato, reappearing in the christian pulpit of Alexan- 
dria more than thirty generations after he had taught 
in the Academy; or whether it be an Aristotle who or- 
ganizes the thought of Greece, not for his own age or 
land alone, but for twenty centuries of Europe; or 
whether it be a Virgil who, like a fountain, spreads 
abroad so wide a river of speech,* thirteen cen- 
turies after his death ; or whether it be the Knights of 
the mediaeval chivalry, leaving behind them in your 
hearts to-day their generous ''loyalty to rank and sex;" 
or whether it be a Bacon who newly organizes the sci- 
entific thought not of England only, but of the whole 
civilized Avprld ; or whether it be a Shakespeare who 
was born not so much to be "the soul of his ow^n agfe" 
as "to hold the mirror up to nature" for all time; or 
whether it be a Titian who, by the miracles of his art, 
has caused men to say that our very sign-boards show 
there has been a Titian in the world. 

The "happy warriors" of King Arthur's Round Table 
have long since passed a^vay — 

"Their bones are dust, their swords are rust, 
Their souls are with the Lord we trust." 

But how their glories and their shames, their loves 
and their conflicts still live among the children of men! — 
first transmuted from the uncouth, rude facts of an early 
barbaric age into the ideal types of mythic legend, and 
then these ideal types still making the whole world kin 
by the touches of a common human nature as their story 

*0r se tu quel Virgilio, e quella fonte, 
Che spnnde di parlar si largo fiurne? 

Div. Com. Inf. Canto I, 



30 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

percolates through the tine brain of a Tennyson till it 
is distilled into the "Idylls of the King" for the in- 
struction and the delight of this nineteenth century. 
John Sobieski, the heroic king of Poland, turns back 
the Moslem hosts from the gates of Vienna and saves 
the christian ciyilization of Europe ; and after him comes 
Filicaja, the poet of another land and of another age, to 
transfigure the heroism of the conquering Prince into 
the perpetual spiritual possession of literature, as he 
sings his deathless lyric, 

"Si, si, viocesti, campion forte e pio; 
Per Dio vincesti, e per te vinsc Iddio." 

And so, when we consider the kindling force of Filica- 
ja's genius acting upon the mind of modern Italy, it is 
not too fanciful to say that this lyric blazed like a con- 
scious flame in the teeming brain of Cavour, and flashed 
like a reflected radiance from the sword of Victor 
Emanuel. 

This, gentlemen, is what we mean, in the highest 
sense of the phrase, by "the conservation and correla- 
tion offerees," — a doctrine only more comprehensive in 
the moral and intellectual world than it is in the physi- 
cal, because in the former it subtends phenomena in- 
finitely more complex, subtle and elastic, as mind is 
infinitely more mobile and spontaneous than matter. 
Consider the mighty spiritual forces which have thus 
far been "conserved" by the frame work of human so- 
ciety, and which, by the organism of that society, have 
been "correlated" into new and ever-widening forms of 
influence, and you can then conceive some faint idea of the 
tremendous energy bequeathed to the present genera- 
tion by the saints and sages, the confessors and martyrs, 
the heroes and patriots, the thinkers and writers who 
have gone before us. And when you have realized all 
these forces, have gauged their intensity, grasped their 
volume and discerned their goal, you will be in a posi- 
tion somewhat to estimate the grandeur of that invisible 
communion into which, as scholars, you are invited to 
enter; and then, too, you will be in a position some- 
what to estimate the high obligations imposed upon you 
by any aspiration to be counted not unworthy of such 
an exalted fellowship, 

— "In every thins: we arc sprune; 
Of earth's first blood- — have titles uKinitold/' 



VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. )] 1 

Some of you are soon to go Ibrtli from tJiese halls and 
to join the procession of worthies who have gone hence 
before you "to perpetuate," in the words of your Col- 
lege Charter, "a succession of ahle and honest men, for 
discharging the various offices and duties of life, both 
civil and religious, with usefulness and reputation/' 
The communion of Scholars to which you belong, as 
sons of St. John's, has its invisible as well as its visible 
fellowships. Among the dead who ''still shed influence 
down" from the higher companionship to which they 
have been gathered, I need but cite the names of a 
Francis Scott Key, whose Tyrtsean lyric has kindled 
the flame of patriotic inspiration in ten thousands oi 
hearts on land and sea, wherever " the Star-Spangled 
Banner" has waved in the battle-smoke or the breeze; 
of a John Tayloe Lomax, who on the bench of justice, 
in the neighboring State of Virginia, "pronounced 
and, in his volume, taught our laws," keeping his 
ermine pure all the while; or of a John Henry Alex- 
ander, respecting whom it is no exaggerated praise to 
say that he had "the most encyclopaediacal head" 
in America, as was said of Diderot in Europe. Such as 
these compose the invisible communion of scholars, who 
even now bend over you from their exalted seats. 
Among the living who still form the ranks of a goodly 
visible fellowship, I need but point to a lleverdy John- 
son, combining in his single person the highest honors 
of the American bar, and of the American Senate, as 
abroad, in the Court of St. James, he prepared the way 
for that great international pacification,* of which the 
praise is none the less his because others have taken its 
honors ; an Alexander E^andall, shedding upon the dig- 
nities of public station the sanctity of those virtues 
which most adorn the Avalks of private life; a William 
Pinkney, on whom the Apostolic spirit has no less visi- 
bly descended than the robes of the sacred office he 
fills, and who, by his eloquence in the pulpit, has add- 
ed—long may he continue to add — fresh lustre to the 
traditional glory of a name . already renowned in the 
annals of Maryland for forensic oratory and juridical 
learning. 

•■^The Treaty of Washington, 1871. 



•i2 THE COMMUNION OF SCHOLARS, 

lliese and sucli as these are your exemplars. And, 
as you mark the prize of your high calling, do you seek 
to know the sign by which you are to conquer in the 
battle of life 1 Look above you ! It is the sign of Him 
who was first the Cross-Bearer, that He might be the 
Peace-Bringer of our race. "Either we will find a way 
or we will make one,"* is the proud motto you have 
chosen as your battle-cry. It was the slogan of Arnold 
Winkelried as he opened a way for the Liberty of 
Switzerland by gathering into his single breast "a sheaf 
of Austrian spears." Whatever may be your career, 
you shall find no way, and make no way, in which there 
are not crosses to carry, if, at the end, there are crowns 
to be w^on and worn. 

Do you seek to know the panoply in which you are 
to arm yourselves for the struggle] Look around you, 

— "In our halls is huDg 
Armory of the invincible knights of old." 

Take that armor down, and gird yourselves for the 
contest. Let no rust gather on sword or shield, and, 
above all, let no spot fall on that "chastity of honor 
which feels a stain like a wound." You have done well 
to hang up the armorial shieldf of your class in this 
hall that has so often echoed to your tread, but do not 
forget, in the battle of life, to set up all your banners in 
the name of Him " to whom the shields of the earth be- 
long." Let the light of Truth guide all your steps, and 
the fragrance of holy living mark your pathway through 
the world, that so, when your summons comes "to join 
the innumerable caravan that moves to the pale realms 
of shade," you may gladly exchange the communion of 
scholars on earth, for the communion of saints in heav- 
en, where, as Lovers of the Beautiful, in that city whose 
walls are jasper, whose gates are pearl and whose streets 
are gold, you shall "see the King in His beauty," face 
to face, without a veil between, and where, as Lovers 
of Learning, you shall know even as also you are 
known. 



*The motto, (expressed in Greek,) of the Class of '71 at St. John's. 
■j-A shield, inscribed with the names of the graduating Class, is 
hung in the, St. John's Chapel. 



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